[Ed. note: this Carnival of Space accidentally went up without many of the links that should have been included. An addendum has been posted here.]

Wow what an Insane Week® it has been. I don't know about you guys, but I'm about ready to head off for a relaxing weekend. But first things first: The Carnival of Space.

The biggest news this week was the disastrous launch of the Orbiting Carbon Observatory. During the launch - aboard an Orbital Sciences Taurus XL vehicle - the payload fairing failed to separate from the vehicle, causing the vehicle/payload to crash somewhere near Antarctica. At least that's what the official pressreleases say. An investigation is pending. It's pretty hard to deny the beauty of any rocket in flight, though, don't you think?

Meanwhile, NASA awarded a contract to Oceaneering International, Inc. to develop the next generation space suits that will be used on the ISS and the Moon. Oceaneering International won a similar contract last June. I have to be honest here (and this is just me talking), I'm not such a huge fan of the design. It may be more functional than previous suits, but it really doesn't have that panache that older suits boasted, even the old-school charm of the Apollo suits. And they can't really hold a candle to the next-gen suits of Virgin Galactic.

Over at Cumbrian Sky, Stu makes an impassioned argument that the MERs are actually martians now. Having spent over 5 years on the red planet, the rovers have spent considerably more time there than they ever had on Earth. An interesting point, which he drives home with awesome images like this. Note how Spirit all but dissolves into the martian soil with years of accumulated dust.

Meanwhile, at Music of the Spheres, you can read a different kind of impassioned prose: advice to a 13 year old girl who wants to be an astronaut. As anyone who has ever dreamed of heading into space can attest, the path to the sky is long and arduous. But the article points out the many opportunities available to women in space, and the various women who have paved the way - including our very own Anousheh Ansari.

In our view, there were several fundamental problems with the Bush Vision and its implementation for Space Exploration inherited from the get-go: ... (2) The VSE lacks strategic merit, which can only be built upon a sufficiently vetted decision-making process of logic and analytic rigor. Especially, such process should have been scrutinized through hearings to engage the American public and politicians. Instead, the Bush VSE was a product of a blind and near-childish emotional response to a series of domestic and international geopolitical events that occurred in 2003, such as the launch of China's Shenzou-5 manned spacecraft on the 15th of October and the STS-107 (Columbia) Space Shuttle disaster in early February.

And while were on the topic of debating, check out this post over at Space Cynics about the extremes of proselytizing space geeks. As a community manager, I can tell you first hand that this sort of thing is not exactly uncommon; indeed those in the space community are an uncommonly passionate group of people. And how can you not? Just look at this:

Afraid I'm going to chime in with another posting oversight -- over at Free Space (http://blogs.discovery.com/news_space/2009/02/darwin-in-space.html) with interviews that didn't make it into a news story about dark energy. The philosophical ramifications and what it may mean to understanding our place in the universe. Thanks.Irene

Title of Post: Blogging the Starry Messenger - The TelescopeURL of Post: http://astroblogger.blogspot.com/2009/02/blogging-starry-messenger-telescope.htmlName of Blog: AstroblogURL of Blog: http://astroblogger.blogspot.com/

Brief summary: This week Galileo's telescope. As noted last week, each week I'm going to blog one "chapter" of the Starry Messenger in honour of International year of Astronomy, and the 400th anniversary of Galileo peering through a telescope at the heavens. Cheers! Ian